Posts by David H

Single letter discrimination?

If it's acceptable to have names like Jay and Yui (an Asian name) that sound like single letters, then pedantically speaking there's nothing wrong with using 'Q' as a name. (Anyway, it's probably better than some of the 'chav' names that are currently doing the rounds.)

Although the boy concerned might have psychological trauma when he discovers that he doesn't have the powers of the Continuum, unless of course he actually has them...

@The BigYin

I've downloaded and installed a copy of the 'American' version (via one of the mirror servers), and it displays "English (UK)" at the bottom of the text document window. Not really had a chance to play with it yet but on this Intel Mac it's running well.

And it must be "going to BitTorrent OR waiting for the weekend"...John needs to brush up on his Boolean logic :)

The Reg has lost it when...

@AC

As for "Is it coming out for real computers instead of the fisher-price versions?", for which presumably by "real computers" you mean PC's, well let me just say that I'd rather have a "fisher-price version" as opposed to having wasted four hours of my life at the weekend trying to get digital TV software working with a USB digital TV tuner dongle under Windows XP (and having to ultimately resort to a full reinstallation of Windows).

And the software didn't work properly when it was finally persuaded to display a picture, which was distorted due to (presumably) video driver problems, meaning I had to resort to using inferior third-party software or spend another three hours trying to configure open source PVR software.

Sky's the limit

Sky would have known that Picnic was always going to be contentious because Sky already dominates satellite pay-TV in the UK so any growth into terrestrial pay-TV was always going to trigger a lengthy monopoly investigation. So it's probably safe to assume that Sky was never going to launch Picnic in the first place; it just wanted to scare the living daylights out of Setanta and put fear and doubt into its competitors just like it did with Virgin Media and ONdigital.

Paris, because even she probably realises that Sky are money-grabbing monopolists and Ofcom are a complete waste of space.

Leave it out

Leaving out the apostrophe in some cases would actually improve some people's grammar and spelling under the current system; people typing "it's" when they should be typing "its" instead has now become common to the extent that they are now incorrectly appearing in advertisements and other more important printed articles - the apostrophe means that there's something missing ("it's" = it is, NOT "its").

@Trevor: Acorn 65?

Trevor was probably half-thinking of the Microtan 65 which was the predecessor to the Oric 1 in much the same way as the Acorn System 1 lead to the Atom/BBC Micro and the Mk14 led to the ZX80/81/Spectrum/etc.

The BBC Micro is perhaps my favourite computer of all time, although Acorn did miss a trick with the Electron by not incorporating some form of memory-saving display mode (4 colour low-res graphics, perhaps?) to make up for a lack of Mode 7 Teletext which the BBC Micro had, since the high resolution graphics (no laughing at the back) did use up a lot of the 32K memory. And the Archimedes was a fab computer as well but that goes without saying (I owned one until 1995 when it was sold for a Mac).

Still waiting

Not for white, but for the iPhone to be available on a PAYG tariff, although O2 really ought to lower their standard PAYG data rates as well (which you get if you don't pay for their monthly £7.50 data bolt-on).

Re: Poor quality video with Eee 901

I don't have one of these but video performance problems could be related to network performance issues; the iPlayer is often unusable for me even using a reasonably powerful desktop computer with a broadband internet connection.

And it may be fashionable to knock the bewildering choice of Eee models that Asus offers but that hasn't harmed the increase in market share that they have recently enjoyed. The large number of choices on offer could be related to a similar strategy employed in the digital camera market, where numerous models are produced with slight changes in specification (and different colours) just to try to ensure maximum shelf space for a particular manufacturer in a shop.

New MacBooks = Drop in profit for Apple

The MacBook Air is currently selling very well for Apple (second in the UK Apple Store sales chart) and is a 'premium' product, therefore any new MacBook that's significantly cheaper than an Air but looks like one and isn't much thicker will inevitably cannibalise some existing Air sales and reduce Apple's profit, at least in the short term, hence very likely to be the real reason for the "future product transition" profit reduction warning.

I will probably get one of these new MacBooks, although the temptation to try and load OSX onto something smaller such as an MSI Wind/Acer Aspire One is currently very great.

Not bad for the money

It's roughly equivalent to half the performance of a MacBook Air for a third of the cost (Advent 4211 plus the cost of a retail copy of OSX Leopard, DVD drive plus a compatible wi-fi card). However it's a pity that the sound input/output sockets don't work, although that problem could theoretically be solved using an external USB audio device.

Despite these minor setbacks I am still seriously tempted given the low cost - the Advent's performance when running OSX is similar to my trusty iMac G5 and that is still a surprisingly capable computer.

Evil Steve Jobs because he really ought to also produce a cheaper MacBook Air with a smaller physical footprint.

The problem

The fact that the Acer wasn't exactly the best of the small laptops (according to a few reviews) was perhaps excusable at £199, but pushing the price up starts to move it into MSI Wind/original Asus EEE territory, especially if Medion introduces its rebadged MSI Wind to the UK at a low price.

How about...

Not surprised

Consider the reasons why US electrical retailer Best Buy are about to establish stores in the UK; they either must be confident of making a profit in the UK (allowing for startup costs) or alternatively have a suicidal death wish (I don't think so somehow).

And that "Currys.digital" rebranding idea was a "good idea" (not) as well; that's like renaming Windscale Sellafield (or whatever).

Does this also mean...

If anyone's seen a certain TV ad for Vodafone's music download service, they may have seen a disclaimer message that reads something like "NOW is a trademark of EMI", which is presumably there because Vodafone's slogan is "Make the most of now" and EMI has the NOW (That's what I call music) compilations - this ruling could put a stop to such stupid disclaimers.

Death of the old guard

Relating to programmes, the market is shifting in favour of content providers (BBC, ITV, etc.) as opposed to TV channels that predominantly rely on imports (Sky), therefore it's no surprise that Sky is upset as a result.

I want one...

It'll all end in tears

A country trying to be simultaneously part of Europe at the same time as 'doing its own thing' is a bad compromise that does nobody any favours whatsoever. Combine this with an economic downturn and you could think that the country is being run by idiots.

All shook up

You knew things were bad

When Dixons stores were rebranded to "Currys.digital". Anyone with half a brain knew that Currys and Dixons were the same entity, and Currys.digital is possibly the worse store name ever conceived in the history of the universe.

Like others have said, why oh why oh why oh why can't a chain of stores offer goods that are cheaper than the so-called list price but dearer than the internet box-shifters? Like others I would happily pay a sensible premium for the convenience of a local store that employs staff who offer a modest level of genuine customer support that doesn't require phone calls, additional postage and delays.

The only thing I remember buying from PC World was a scanner but that was only because they were the cheapest and because they offered store collection at their internet price. (And I had done my research beforehand.)

And bigger stores is what we need in an era of rising fuel prices. Not.

Watch out

@Anonymous Hero

I'm not really a Coldplay fan (some of their tracks are OK though), but to cast judgement on something without actually hearing it is rather harsh though, don't you think? (This time they might have produced an album full of banging techno tunes or South American pan pipes.)

As for saving the world, well why not? And what is actually wrong with 'doing good' - surely by definition it must be better than doing bad? They may be wealthy rock stars - hypocritical ones if you insist - but they're entitled to their opinions and you don't have to listen to them.

Death of a monopoly

Murdoch is upset because the new-found popularity of the iPlayer has significantly brought forward the day when many people will realise that they can (broadly speaking) get almost everything that Sky currently offers (except perhaps live sports coverage, but that day will surely come) for less from the internet.

All I can say is that the world will be a much better place once the Sky subscription TV monopoly is well and truly broken; the Murdoch boys are scared of real competition which was all too evident when they blocked Virgin Media from taking over ITV with their ITV shares purchase.

"Looking forward to a hard drive..."

Try asking Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson market what are essentially very similar phones in numerous different casings (metal, plastic, candybar, slider, etc.) and sell them at different price points to different groups of users (high-flying executives, fashion-conscious young people, etc.). Nokia are presumably doing the same with the N82, which must be notably cheaper to manufacture compared with the N95's metal case that also has sliding bits.

Don't forget...

Unless the music file has been encoded in a lossless format (still all too rare an occurrence), music played from a CD will have better sound quality than MP3/AAC/WMA files as long as your sound system is of half-decent quality.

William - You're wrong!

Firstly Arif Rashid had also mentioned the (new) router "(they posted the day before)" in the message, and secondly Virgin also supplies a broadband service via BT lines which is what I use at home - see http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/service.do?id=2 for more information.